Dec 15, 2006
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Many reports of the recently concluded Holocaust-denial conference in Iran highlighted the presence of several Jews clad in classic Orthodox garb. The media’s understandable attraction to arresting photographs and anomalous groups has led to an extraordinary level of public misperception regarding this handful of participants, who have made their way over the years to various events organized by Jew-haters and unrelenting enemies of Israel.

To call these people a group is to stretch that term to its breaking point and beyond. They are a few disturbed individuals. They represent no one. Even Orthodox Jews who distance themselves from the ideology of Zionism care deeply about the safety of Israel and are revolted by these purported paragons of Orthodoxy. The time has come for the press to ignore them, and if the canons of journalism render this impossible, to depict them in the clearest terms as the utterly insignificant figures that they are.